Lives Of Our Days

Two gold nuggets from Chris Dixon in the past week or so:

The Default State Of A Startup Is Failure

If you are starting a company and wondering why nothing good seems to happen unless you force it to happen, that’s because the world wants to stay the way it is. Customers, partners, and most of all incumbents don’t want to think hard, try new things, or change in any way. The world is lazy and just wants to keep doing what it’s doing…

The default state of the world is to stay the way it is, which means the default state of a startup is failure.

Given that I’ve been so quiet of late, I wanted to share three of the best articles that I’ve read recently.

First, a great piece on the team at Discovr and making apps people want:

People ask me how a marine biologist and musician can end up developing apps. For me, there’s not much difference between being a scientist or a musician or making apps. If you’re passionate about something, you can learn whatever you need to do quickly then use patterns and processes to put it into action.

What Stu and I have in common is we’re trying to make great products. We have strong opinions and generally are very aligned and know where we need to get to. It is more a discussion of how we get there. I think a big part of the relationship is the different way we think about things – the strategies and approaches. That combination is good…

Next up, Mark Pincus explaining how to fail:

One thing I learned is that while your vision should never change, you should keep trying different strategies until one works. If you can fine-tune your instinct and have confidence in it, then you can keep taking different bites of the apple and keep approaching the problem in different ways until you get it right…

I think failing is the best way to keep you grounded, curious, and humble. Success is dangerous because often you don’t understand why you succeeded. You almost always know why you’ve failed. You have a lot of time to think about it.

And last but definitely not least Apple vs Google - Lessons From Bill Gates Playbook:

Much of Microsoft’s power derived from an inevitability that they established in the market. Anything that they cast their eyes upon would become a commodity, a ubiquitous set of functions that would essentially become free….so long as you bought into the Microsoft bundle.

While Apple has focused on creating and maintaining proprietary differentiation and the high-margin pricing and customer loyalty that it affords, Google has fully embraced commoditization to try and disrupt its competitors’ business models. Apple’s strategy has worked incredibly well for them, owing to the halo effect that they have created for themselves (i.e., entire families become Apple households, standardizing on Macs, iPods, iPhones and iPads). By contrast, I’d argue that Google has miscalculated how long it’s going to take for post-PC devices to reach a commoditized state, and the layers of functionality that they will have to seamlessly integrate and iterate to become a viable alternative in the cloud era. If anything, Amazon is better positioned as the Un-Android Android.

All three articles gave me a new perspective on one thing or another. I hope they do the same for you too!

Thanks to some awesome work by rockstar hacker Jay Whiting, we’ve now got a new project live - http://www.just1link.com/.

The premise is simple: If you could share just one link all week, what would it be?

Tell us what was the most thought-provoking article, the most interesting concept, the piece from which you learned the most… If your week could only be defined by one link, then we want to know what that link is.

One of the awesome things about the internet is that it lets us all share a million and one things, but sometimes there is value in scarcity.

We’d love to hear what you think of Just 1 Link - the project has literally come together overnight, MVP-style, so any criticism is more that welcome!